Quinn is one of my dear friends, one of a cadre who are scattered about the world. Occasionally I am very fortunate to find myself in the same place, at the same time with them. When those moments occur, it is like little or no time has elapsed. With Quinn, most of the time I enjoy following her thoughts and explorations through her professional output as a journalist. This piece is somewhere in between, a bit like the conversations we have when visiting and yet intersecting with the topics I know to be near and dear to here, security, privacy, and evolving digital norms. Reading this is time well spent.Read More …

I was glad to see that I am still having a positive impact. When I started to think about it some more, though, I wondered just how much lately I had been living up to my saying. Especially when it comes to this site and podcast, I didn’t feel like I was doing a good job. Up until recently, for the better part of a year, posts and episodes had been few and far between.

Sure, there are reasons for that. I have written a few posts discussing them. Despite those reasons I had intentionally been keeping at my pastimes even if it didn’t show. I kept going to my guitar lessons every Sunday and practicing almost every day. I tried to keep writing although with less success. I started baking and re-dedicated myself to brewing. I undertook an experiment in podcasting that worked out so well, it has helped me re-invigorate the show I have been making for over a decade.

I didn’t think about it that way at the time, but the deliberate choice to make myself pursue my hobbies was a hack. I worried that in the face of stress, I would shut down. I didn’t want my world to be solely defined by my difficulties and my struggle to cope. Several other intentional choices or practices snapped into the same focus. I was delighted to realize I could be living up to one of my ideals even though I had not been giving myself the conscious credit for doing so.

My choice felt hacky in another way. Not all hacks are elegant even if they are effective. Early on I am not sure I really enjoyed or held much enthusiasm for my pastimes. Forcing myself to work at my various hobbies helped on one level. I felt a sense of accomplishment. I had things to talk about with co-workers, acquaintances and friends that were about something other than my family’s travails. But joy? Until lately, not really.

The silver lining of a bad hack is it contains the seed of the next hack, the dissatisfaction that prompts a re-think and overhaul that hopefully leads to something better to take its place. Only in the last few weeks have I realized how bad this hack was, namely how the lack of joy was affecting me. It sapped my desire to work on anything truly creative or hard, like writing. As much as I felt like I was coping I didn’t feel like I was really getting all that much better at truly getting above the stresses in my life.

There was one exception to my pursuits feeling rote or forced, brewing. It almost didn’t end up being a cause for joy. My friendship with my long time brewing partner ended last year. That could have been cause to give up, to close that chapter of my life and move on. I wasn’t brewing as often as I had even two years earlier. The bottling dates on the beers in my cellar showed the time between each brew getting farther apart. That bothered me, not having home brew on hand as often as I wanted to share or enjoy it. I already had the motivation to start brewing more frequently. I just needed to figure out how to do that on my own, with or without the assistance of anyone else.

At the end of last year with this thought in mind I researched upgrades to my equipment and my process. Before, I needed at least one willing volunteer to help me complete a batch. I still planned to invite friends to the new brew days. Whether anyone showed up or not, I wanted to be able to make a beer. I saw the invitations as an opportunity both to re-connect with old friends and to nourish sustaining friendships. I changed those parts of the process that used to rely on help from other people to use new equipment instead. I added two additional vessels to my rig so I would not be as rushed preparing pots for each step. Instead of lifting gallons of boiling and near boiling liquid, I now use a pump to get the beer where I need it at each stage. Now I can keep the process going on my own. I can teach and share my craft if that’s what my friends wanted, or just be social. More than anything else, including friends always has been more of a social benefit for me.

Finding the motivation to podcast again was much harder. I enjoy making a podcast but I enjoy it very differently than the way I enjoy brewing and the end result of making a beer. Both require similar amounts of effort, at least mentally. The reward I get from a podcast is more abstract. Sipping on a fresh beer is both its own immediate reward and encouragement for me to start working on the next beer. A new podcast episode doesn’t provide me with the same feedback loop. Finding the motivation for the next episode isn’t any easier for having completed the last episode.

About six months back, several old friends resuscitated their podcasts. I was inspired by hearing their voices again, especially their stories about why they returned. I had already freed myself of the obligation of a regular schedule. I recorded spontaneous episodes for this podcast when I had a topic in mind, either as a fully written out essay or just an idea I wanted to talk about off the cuff. Those decisions did not result in me producing more episodes. The longer format still felt like a burden even though I still feel it is best suited for the topics I pursue here. I didn’t want to try yet another change, a shorter format, only to have that fail. I was not, am not, done with this site or this podcast but needed a way to experiment more freely to figure out what I wanted or needed to do next.

I used to have another, more free form podcast. That ended over a year ago but I didn’t feel like I was done with the topics I had started to explore there, mostly centered around travel, food, and drink. I realized I had an opportunity to create something new. I took the things that inspired me from my friends’ shows and combined them with the things I thought I could manage in a new project. I didn’t want to saddle myself with a lot of writing and preparation. A much shorter format, five minutes, felt like a better choice for speaking about some topic on the fly. Keeping a list of topics and just working through each in turn was about all the planning I wanted to do. I used the new show to try to simplify the recording, editing and production process too so that I had less reason not to get a show out.

So far, the Audio Diary of a Peculiar Character has been an outstanding success. I have not missed a week in six months. If anything, keeping myself to only five minutes has been the only challenge. It would be very easy for me to allow the core segment to creep up by a minute, then another, until shows reached ten and twenty minutes. I have had some more involved stories to tell. To keep them to the strictly self enforced limit, I did some planning, breaking them into a series of back to back episodes. On any given weekend, I sit down to record one or two new segments. When I am ready to post an episode, everything is pretty much cut and paste. I routinely, though not always, have a queue of two or three shows ready to go. Having a safety net, more than anything, has reduced the amount of stress I feel about producing a new weekly show.

About two months ago, I finally decided to put what I had learned on the new show into practice to help bring back a more regular schedule for The Command Line. I re-recorded and edited a lot of the canned bits to make them easier to just drop in with a single, freshly recorded segment at the core of each episode. I had been meaning to do this for a long time but the practice with the new show finally removed my last excuse. The only remaining challenge was the content. I wasn’t getting any better at writing on a regular basis for the shows that featured an essay. Then it occurred to me that the way I read my tech news every day might be similar enough to the rolling list of topics in the new show that it would be worth bringing back the news shows.

The Command Line has been and continues to be about how I keep learning about the world of tech. The news shows were always a large part of that but I used to think they were too labor intensive. I used to prepare them by writing out as much if not more notes than a typical essay. In retrospect, it is no wonder they were feeling like more of a drag than they were worth. Even though I stopped writing up such detailed thoughts on what I was reading, I was still reading. I was still sharing those stories, straight out of my feed reader.

Quite some time ago I switched readers, to tiny tiny rss. Since the switch, I have continued to refine and simplify how I use this tool to keep my daily reading manageable. Instead of compiling daily and weekly link dumps on my blog like I used to do I can now just link to a feed of stories I re-publish out of my reader. Unlike Google’s now defunct Reader, tt-rss has lots of capabilities designed for sharing stories. I can annotate stories with my thoughts as part of that. I like shifting the sharing down to the individual story rather than compilations. Social sharing feels more natural at this scale. The comment I add into the feed works well as a comment when I share to Google+, Facebook or Twitter.

What my current reading habits boil down to is that I have a list of the stories I’ve read, felt were worth sharing, and a quick comment to point out what I found interesting. This list is perfect for a re-vitalized news cast. I can just talk through each story in turn until I am either done with them or hit the twenty minute mark. I don’t have to do a lot of preparation in advance, I already did as much as I need on a daily basis throughout the week. So far, I think this is working well. The feedback on this new approach has been very positive.

Even though I have brought the podcast back to life with a refresh on the news format, I am still working on my writing. I don’t have any hard won lessons to share on that, at least not yet. This essay, alone, has taken me weeks and weeks to draft. I struggle with what I think is probably the simplest, best advice I’ve heard–just write. If it were that easy in practice, everyone would be writing constantly. I am still thinking about what I can learn from the other hacks I’ve discussed here. For me, tooling and work flow matter. Having a process set up about which I get a little excited helps tip the scales towards doing rather than not doing.

Despite how long it took me to get from starting this essay to sharing it with you, I do feel like I continue to make progress. Much of how I currently go about my professional life and my passions is just the latest in an ongoing series of hacks. Not everything I come up with is so interesting or involved that I feel it is worth sharing. Some days I come up with tweaks, changes and tricks too small and numerous to relate. On a good day, I can’t help but smile about the latest way, big or small, I’ve found to keep hacking my world. Feeding that joy is the most important hack of all for me.

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"[T]houghtful, informative, and deep, a real plunge into the geeky end of the news-pool. There's great analysis and rumination, as well as detailed explanations of important security issues with common OSes and so on." -- Cory Doctorow